In this episode of Shrine Stories, we uncover the story behind a toy rabbit on display in the galleries.
Listen as Shrine Education Officer Peter Luby uncovers its link to the fall of Singapore and the mystery behind its owner.
Music
On this Day - Richard Smithson
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: Hello and welcome to Shrine Stories, a podcast where we take you behind the scenes into the stories behind the objects on our gallery floor. My name is Laura Thomas, and in this episode, you'll hear about how an unsuspecting toy rabbit on display in our galleries has a very dark past. This rabbit was found under terrifying circumstances during the fall of Singapore, and joining me to tell us the full story is one of the Shrine's Education Officers, Peter Luby. Set the scene for us. What was happening in the time leading up to when this rabbit was found?
PETER LUBY: Well, the rabbit was found on one of the Singapore docks during the last days of the evacuation of Singapore, which had been taking place since December 1941 in fits and starts, but there was a lot of hesitation on the part of particularly civilians, to leave Singapore because they felt that it was a safer place to be than out on the open water. And nobody, at least in the civilian population truly believed that the campaign was going to collapse and that the Japanese would enter Singapore, and on the eighth of February, the Japanese landed on the island. Finally, after something like 70 days of the campaign on the Malayan mainland, so the rabbit was discovered on the 11th of February, which was one of the last convoys to leave Singapore, one of the last evacuation convoys where civilians had an opportunity to leave the city, which by that stage, was almost literally burning. It was under daily Japanese bombing attacks from the air, and by this stage, Japanese artillery was on the island itself. So there was a certain level of chaos in the centre of the city, particularly on the docks, where the ships were trying to load passengers.
LAURA THOMAS: And who found this rabbit?
PETER LUBY: So the rabbit was found by one of the Australian nursing sisters who was with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital, which was one of the two main hospital units where the Australian nurses were serving during the Malayan campaign. And her name was Sister Kathleen McMillan, and she was a Victorian nurse from Terang who had ended up in Malaya in 1941 with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital, and was now being evacuated with some of the other nurses from the 2/13th Australian General Hospital.
LAURA THOMAS: And so she found it amid the chaos of what was going on around her. But do we know who owned it before her?
PETER LUBY: No, we don't know anything about it really. It's part of its fascination is that it has no backstory that we can confirm. It has no provenance as a historical object other than the fact that it was found at this moment by Sister Macmillan. It was in the chaos of loading the civilians and the nursing staff and other technical staff who were boarding a ship called the Empire Star, Sister Macmillan picked it up, thinking that perhaps a child who had gone up the gangway ahead of her had dropped it, and she had hoped during the voyage and even later in her later life, to somehow be able to reunite this rabbit with its owner. But that's, I guess, a presumption on her part and on our part, that it actually had belonged to a child, because there was another factor of the evacuation in those last few days, was that there were lots of warehouses in the docks that were being ransacked for supplies to be put onto the ships, and some of the military personnel who were helping evacuate passengers onto these ships found lots of things like cigarettes and food, but also children's toys. And there's actually quite a few accounts of other survivors of the evacuation of Singapore that they also found toys and kids toys that were on the ships with them. So they may have been simply supplies that had arrived at the docks that hadn't been distributed to shops in Singapore. But the fact that, in a sense, it doesn't have a confirmed backstory, means that we can attach a lot of ideas to it, and it can represent something probably perhaps more than it actually does represent
LAURA THOMAS: As you mentioned, it was picked up by Sister Kathleen Macmillan as she was boarding the Empire star. Peter, Can you tell me a little bit about the journey of that ship?
PETER LUBY: Yes, well, the ship was one of those ships that had come in with one of those, almost the last convoy to enter Singapore, and it was commanded by Commander Capon, who was a merchant mariner, very seasoned commander of a merchant ship called the Empire Star, which was a refrigerated cargo ship. So it was quite a modern ship. I think it was built in the 1920s and it was basically a ship that ran between England and Australia and New Zealand and back, carrying cargo of refrigerated meat from the Dominions back to the United Kingdom. It had capacity for, I think, something like 20 passengers on the ship, but it wasn't a passenger ship. So he brought that ship in in late January 1942 and it was assigned to take out as many technical staff from the RAF and the Royal New Zealand Air Force and medical staff from English and Australian hospitals to try and get them to safety in Java. It ended up having on board around 2000 people.
LAURA THOMAS: Wow.
PETER LUBY: So it was a small ship in terms of its capacity to sort of look after human beings on the ship or have passengers, or space for passengers. It wasn't kitted out to, you know, hold that many people, but it had big decks, and it had big refrigerated holds, which are empty, obviously. And the nurses who had to climb down into these holds remarked that they still smelt of sort of stale meat. So it wasn't the most pleasant environment in which to spend the next three or four days. But for anyone at that point leaving Singapore, any any ship was what was a good ship. So 2000 odd people were on this ship, about 1500 military personnel, mainly from the air forces. There are about 40 British nursing sisters who were accompanying 80 wounded soldiers on stretchers, and the crew of the ship was about 88 and on top of that, there were something close to 165 civilians, like women and children. And we think close to 35 kids were on the ship. The captain, in the end, was not really or he didn't have time to make out a passenger list, and he was basically letting anybody who was there in those last hours on the dock get onto the ship. So the people who got onto the Empire Star were very lucky, because the captain was just permitting anybody who was there at the right time to get onto the ship.
LAURA THOMAS: It's a horrific and terrifying picture that you're painting. But beyond the overcrowding, the terror that they experienced, and then the smell that you said of the ship itself, what was their journey like? I imagine it would have been quite an uncomfortable one.
PETER LUBY: Incredibly uncomfortable. I mean, as they were leaving Singapore, the whole harbor area and if not almost the whole island was under a pall of acrid black smoke from oil tanks, the oil supply tanks around Singapore harbor and the Singapore naval base, which had been set alight in the previous week by the British to deny it to the Japanese as part of the scorched earth policy. So Singapore city was basically ringed by all these huge fires from oil tanks, which everybody who has written accounts of this period describes the darkness over the city in the middle of the day because there was clouds of black smoke, basically completely covering the sun with the fires burning underneath. So the atmosphere was quite hellish, almost literally, flames burning everywhere. There were installations around the docks that were on fire from the Japanese bombing raids and also with tropical rain typical of Singapore, the smuts from the oil burning in the air came back onto the land and onto the ships and onto the people as an oily black film. Once the ship was out of the harbor, it was now night time, the last people got onto the ship, I think, while it was dark. And then the ship couldn't escape Singapore harbor in the darkness, because there were minefields in the harbor, and the naval commanders had sort of lost knowledge of where the mines were, so they had to wait until dawn for the escape ships to be guided out of the harbor, safely through the minefields that they could see visually in daylight, and then they moved out as dawn broke into open water, and within an hour, the whole convoy came under attack by 27 Japanese bombers that had found them.
PETER LUBY: And so the first experience of the people who'd got out of Singapore on the Empire Star was this massive air raid attack on the ship, which ended up damaging the ship, not critically, but damaging it enough for fires to break out on the decks and for there to be great confusion on the ship. 13 people were killed on the Empire Star during that air raid. And the ship was dodging Japanese bombs for the best part of an hour or two. And it was only according to people on the ship the skill of the captain, Captain Capon, who was watching the Japanese bombers come over the ship, with a number of observers with binoculars lying on their backs on the decks, looking up at the sky and shouting out as the planes came in which direction they were coming in. And so the captain was then very quickly giving orders to turn the ship this way or that to avoid the direction of the bombs as they came over. So he basically guided the ship through this air raid for an hour or two. They finally got out onto open water heading towards Java, and after that, they were reasonably safe from attack, because in that last day or two before February 13, the Japanese had still not come close enough to Singapore to be able to send either naval ships or bombers after the ships that had escaped Singapore.
LAURA THOMAS: And while on board the ship, the news officially broke that Singapore had fallen. What was that reaction like on board for the people that had lived and worked there for such a period of time?
PETER LUBY: It would have been, I think even having seen what they'd seen in their escape from Singapore city, I think it still came as a great shock, because the the military response to the invasion of the island had been that they were going to stick it out. They were going to hang out, hang out for reinforcements and beat the Japanese back. So I think even in those last few days, people were still feeding off this feeling that Singapore was a fortress and that it could be defended and it could be saved. But certainly, most of the people who left on on the Empire Star had other people still back in Singapore. They either had their husbands serving in the military or male civilians who weren't evacuated in those last few days. So everybody had people back in Singapore that they'd left behind, often in a great rush. One of the Australians who was on the Empire star was a Tasmanian woman called Carlene Reed, and she'd been working with Malaya command as a secretary up until the last few days, but she got permission to leave on the Empire Star, and she wrote a very interesting account of her whole experience on the ship. And she said when the news came through that "the news that Singapore had fallen was perfectly ghastly. The sense of all our men trapped, over 60,000 of them, and no more would get away. And it was not possible to describe the feelings of the people on our ship that day. It seemed too terrible to believe, but we had to believe it". So I think that's an example of how the news affected the people. They knew that there was no chance for anybody else who hadn't got out by that point. Now the fate of those who stayed behind was completely unknown as well, and for most people, would remain an unknown quantity for three and a half years.
PETER LUBY: What happened to the Australian nurses who didn't make it out on the Empire Star? Because there were 130 Australian nurses serving in the Malayan campaign who all ended up in Singapore in that last week. And the Empire Star only took 60 or 63 of them, so there was another 60 who were left behind, and they're the nurses who ended up on the Vyner Brooke, whose story we know from lots of other accounts, the terrible fate of those women, those who didn't survive the sinking of that ship, or didn't survive the massacre on Bangka Island, or those Australian nurses who did survive the sinking of the Vyner Brooke but went into captivity for three and a half years on Sumatra, and their fate was completely unknown until the end of hostilities in 1945 so yes, it was the beginning of a really terrible period for all those people who had either been on Singapore or who had relatives in the Australian Army who were captured on Singapore, just that sense of not knowing what had happened to those men and women, soldiers, nurses and civilians for three and a half years.
LAURA THOMAS: When did the Empire Star land in Australia?
PETER LUBY: The Empire Star arrived in Fremantle on the 23rd of February, so about a week after the fall of Singapore itself, and they were met by the local Red Cross Society, who were there at the dock at Fremantle with fresh clothing and provisions. But strangely, there's also a story that some of the nurses were handed white feathers by citizens of Western Australia when they arrived. There was not an understanding of what they'd been through or what had happened at Singapore yet, and I guess there wouldn't be for most of the war. I mean, the news had come through that Singapore had fallen, but I think to some civilians in Australia, the sight of Australian nurses getting off a ship in Fremantle in more or less safety, looked very different to what they'd actually been through.
LAURA THOMAS: What does the white feather mean?
PETER LUBY: Well, the white feather is a symbolic representation of cowardice. It's probably more associated with the First World War. We hear lots of stories from World War One in Australia and in England of women handing a white feather to a man a civilian on the street to make the accusation. You know 'Why are you not in uniform? Are you too cowardly? Not brave enough to join the army?'. So, it doesn't make sense at all to me in the context of the Empire Star nurses, because, I mean, they were in military uniform. They were military nurses coming back from a war zone. So it just must have been somebody who had the wrong end of the stick, I think, in terms of who these women were and where they were coming from. So one of the nurses from the second 2/10th Australian General Hospital, Margaret Hamilton, she remembers that the nurses said goodbye to Captain Capon as they left the ship, and he asked them to do two things every day of their lives thereon, which was to thank God that they were alive, and to never forget the merchant navy and Captain Capon himself later wrote, "strange as it may perhaps seem, it's perfectly true. There are times deep down when I'm apt to be somewhat emotional", and he was crying as the nurses left his ship, because he'd been through that experience with them as well the bombing raid in which he'd seen some of the Australian nurses protecting the wounded on the deck of the ship from machine gun bullets of the Japanese airplanes as the planes came over. Two of these nurses, sister Vera Torney and Sister Margaret Anderson, they protected the wounded soldiers on the deck of the ship by shielding them with their own bodies as the Japanese planes came over. And he had observed this during the incident, and he made recommendations for bravery awards to be given to them. And Sister Torney was given the military OBE for her actions on that day. And Sister Margaret Anderson received the George Medal, which is one of the highest awards for valor, usually given in a strange enough in a non war setting. So it's very unusual that she was the first member of the Australian Army Nursing service to be awarded the George Medal, which is usually given in a peacetime setting.
LAURA THOMAS: Now Captain Capon himself unfortunately suffered a tragic fate after dropping these nurses off in Australia. What happened there, Peter?
PETER LUBY: Yeah, so this is a man who'd served in the merchant navy in the First World War, and he'd been awarded the OBE for his actions in the First World War, and during the campaign around Greece and Crete, he was one of the evacuation ships there as well. And he got through that. And then his next mission was to take a convoy through to Singapore, and then he took on the civilians and the military personnel in Singapore on the Empire Star. Now he went on to continue his service in the merchant navy over the next eight or nine months, and he was on convoys going back towards England, around the coast of Africa, and the Empire star was sunk by a German submarine, a U boat, in the mid atlantic eight months after he'd landed in Australia with the nurses from Singapore. So most of the crew and passengers at that point got off into three lifeboats that drifted in the South Atlantic for two days in heavy seas, and eventually, two of those three lifeboats were rescued by Royal Navy ships, but the third boat was lost, and Captain Capon and 37 crew and passengers were on that third lifeboat that didn't make it back. But yes, the nurses who knew him from the Empire Star voyage never forgot him, and they always called it the lucky ship, you know, talking amongst themselves. They call the Empire Star the lucky ship because it was the one that got through, the one that did get out of Singapore, and it was the ship that got 60 Australian nurses out, as opposed to the Vyner Brooke, which had the other fate.
LAURA THOMAS: It's a tragic tale, but a very important one. So Peter, I'm curious as to why you chose this item to talk about. Why do you think people visiting the Shrine or learning about the Shrine should be aware of this story and the rabbit itself?
PETER LUBY: Well, the rabbit is a beautiful little object. It's, it's, it's sort of slightly hidden away in the Shrine galleries because it's in a display cabinet that doesn't face the main areas where people move through the galleries. So I kind of feel sorry for it. It's got such a folorn look. This rabbit that has that we know has been through so much, it sits there with a little little bow tie and one of its eyes is missing. It sort of seems to capture the pathos of that era of the Singapore evacuations. I've read quite a bit of the accounts of civilians in the Malayan campaign. The plight of civilians in war is something that sort of, I think it gets to you in a different way to the stories of military service, because generally, civilians are inadvertently caught up in war, and they're in places they shouldn't be, and they experience things that they shouldn't have to experience. And this little child's toy from that the chaos of that last week of evacuations in Singapore, you know, seems to it does invite imagination, it does invite conjecture about the story behind it, but having read quite a few accounts of civilians who survived either the Singapore evacuation or who didn't escape Singapore, I'm attracted to stories about that historical event, I suppose. Looking back a bit further, I now can also see that my interest in in that campaign and the Singapore evacuation also links to one of my great uncles, who was serving with the eighth division in Singapore when the city fell to the Japanese and he was one of those 15,000 Australians who went into captivity at Changi, and many of them went on to work on the Thai Burma railway or were sent to labor camps in Japan, and so many of them lost their lives. And my great uncle survived the war, miraculously. He spent most of his war in Changi camp itself and came back to Australia. But I think just in the back of my mind always, I think there's that connection to that story through a relative that makes the stories really interesting to me.
LAURA THOMAS: Thank you so much, Peter for sharing this story and your connection with it. It's been fascinating.
PETER LUBY: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
LAURA THOMAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of Shrine Stories. For more, make sure you subscribe to our channel wherever you listen.
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